


the rubble of my sins that I'm standing in

by ninemoons42



Series: love and blades: a rebelcaptain AU [5]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - James Bond Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Hurt Jyn Erso, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Music, Inspired by Real Events, Literal Sleeping Together, Missions Gone Wrong, Post-Mission, by which I mean modern era spy story violence, written in the style of Casino Royale 2006
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 19:55:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11881686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Agent Stardust makes a potentially dangerous discovery in the wake of a botched mission with the other Partisans, and retreats to a mountaintop city to lick her wounds, to make plans, and to try and set her mind in order.





	the rubble of my sins that I'm standing in

**Author's Note:**

> I took some inspiration for the title from [this acoustic version of Bastille performing Pompeii](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/post/64672987563/crazyloststar-heydumbdumbs-chadmaxey-the).
> 
> And now there is plot for this spy AU, ahahaha.

It’s not the cold that keeps her awake in the depths of the night: after all, she is already tucked into several blankets. After all, she is already wearing two pairs of socks. After all, she has already locked all of the windows tightly closed, all except one, and that particular draft she can ignore and grit her teeth at, because she doesn’t want the air in this room to go stale. After all, there’s a fireplace, and the bin next to it is full of logs to replace the one that’s currently burning.

It’s not the itch, either: after all, there’s nothing even remotely unusual about the injury to her arm. She’s lucky it’s not a complete fracture; the numbing cream and the support tape and the clean bandages wrapped from just above her wrist to just below her shoulder will see to her healing, and so will the fact that she’s far more than used to sleeping with one or more of her limbs thrust out into some unnatural position or another.

It’s not the bed, unfamiliar as it is: the very idea of a city wrapped in pines and crisp fog seems laughable in a tropical country, but it turns out this tropical country is studded with mountain ranges, several of which are high enough above sea level that their prevailing low temperatures are actually the main reason why the city exists in the first place. The place used to be a summer resort for the country’s elite, she knows that, and now anyone and everyone can come to that city, seeking respite from the vile heat and humidity of the rest of the country. 

This bed is one of ten, each one tucked into an elegantly decorated room, with color-themed paintings and curtains warming up the seemingly forbidding walls of aged stone and faded whitewash. Ten bedrooms on the upper level, and the lower level divided into a handful of large spaces: kitchen, dining hall, library, sitting room, and partly-enclosed patio. The windows are all oversized and triple-paned, the better to let in the views of restored forests marching up cragged mountainsides, the better to keep out the frosts that seem determined to creep in, night after night.

The odd thing is that she’s been invited into this house of stone and unexpected warmth: and stranger still, that the person who invited her here is mostly unknown even in the circles in which she normally travels. 

Sabé Panaka, she said her name had been, and the fob onto which all of the keys to the house had borne a simple symbol of two small circles placed above the points of a horizontal crescent moon.

“It might not have been her real name,” had been Leia’s words of caution when she’d delivered the keys. “I knew a Sabé, and she had worked with my mother in some sort of official capacity. I can’t really imagine that’s such a common first name. So she might conceivably be the same person, but I can’t take that to the bank and neither should you.”

“I don’t plan to. Trustworthy?” Jyn had asked, referring to the house and its security systems, and to the knowledge of its existence.

“I suggest you find yourself a bolthole anyway, just in case.”

She hasn’t looked at that extra set of keys in a few days, but perhaps she has her excuses: the nip in the mountain breezes, and, conversely, the snug warmth of the blankets piled onto her bed. Everything in the room is done in darker shades of blue, including the tiles in the adjacent half-bath, and it feels jarring whenever she glances away from the bed or its pillows or its blankets to the bandages running up her arm.

No way to train, here, not with her arm in its current sorry state -- and since she’d had the bad luck to wake up in the middle of the night local time, there’s no place for her to go out to get something to eat, either, unless she wants to chance the convenience store halfway down the steep hillside.

There are books tucked away into her personal tablet. She can finally sit down to read that trilogy that Baze has been pressing on her, with the promise of a fourth book coming out before the year is over. 

But she doesn’t feel like doing much of anything, except feel sorry for herself.

And again her mind returns to the question that it’s been circling, circling, as though the question were a fleet of sharks and her mind the hapless helpless swimmer about to succumb to an undertow.

Pain, a sharp and thankfully brief reminder, like a lashing spark down from the back of her neck to the small of her back: not like the pain of getting winged by a bullet, but still too close for comfort even with the lightweight armor she’d been wearing. Less bulk in the protective plates -- just enough to save her from anything more than a graze -- she remembers screaming for backup, remembers yelling out one of the code phrases she’d agreed on with Leia and the others. The code phrases had only ever been intended as a far-out-there contingency plan.

But when she closes her eyes she can still almost see the boy with his own bulletproof vest, with his own helmet, dead in the arms of one of the other Partisans.

How, how, how, is the question that is still ringing in her mind, six days after the failed mission.

That the boy was shot dead there is no question, because the autopsy report is on her work tablet. An entire section is devoted not just to the bullet that had been found lodged in the back of the boy’s neck, but to those people and organizations who make a point out of using it.

That there had been several groups chasing the boy -- the presumed-innocent son of an inept fascist and hatemonger who had somehow risen to the highest electoral office of a so-called First World country -- Jyn had managed to reason out a good number of those groups based on the intelligence that the Partisans had been gathering in the weeks leading up to the mission, and Leia had filled in the blanks for the rest.

Many of those groups had had their own reasons for wanting the boy dead.

One of them, or maybe all of them, had succeeded.

Leaving Jyn with one more question: how?

With the painkillers in their scheduled doses still running through her system, she can’t drink -- and she would have wanted to drink something, anything, in that boy’s honor.

She would have wanted to drink something so she could get ready to investigate the failed mission, her failed mission.

She would have wanted to drink something just to erase the idea, the faint possibility, that there was a traitor hiding in the Partisans’ ranks.

It’s not a good thought to have and she knows it, she hates herself for thinking it, and yet -- she still has to.

Leia had not objected to her voicing the thought, in a very secure chat channel that was restricted to just the two of them, and had maybe even hinted that she was thinking the same way.

It shouldn’t have been surprising -- and it isn’t. What it is, is painful, nearly as painful as her own injury, sustained in the mad escape from whoever had been shooting in the first place. She’d gotten the others out, had provided covering fire, had jumped into the last departing van -- 

One more bullet whizzing past, far too close for comfort, before they could completely close the door, before the bucking lurch of the van jumping into motion could slam the door onto Jyn’s own arm.

She’s been gnawing at the scenario for days now, and there is no more gristle to be found on that bone, not while Leia continues to hunt through their own ranks, and the jump into those forests of pine, down those precipitous mountainside drops, is starting to look better and better with each passing minute --

Ring. Ring.

Not her phone, and neither of her tablets.

The tremulous ringing of the phone, the actual landline, with a cordless unit that had been gathering dust on the bedside table.

Ringing and ringing and ringing, and Jyn stares at the instrument with loathing, with fear bristling in her gut.

The ringing stops, abruptly.

And Jyn’s personal tablet chimes receipt of an encrypted message.

_That was me. Pick up. Or let me in if you can. I heard the news. C_

“Let me in,” and she repeats his words, quietly.

She forces herself out of the bed. Onto her feet. Pain slows her down, and the cold makes her shuffle along with a blanket thrown over her shoulders.

She has to hold on to her gun with her one good hand, which trembles with the temperatures, with the deepening night, with the fear that still haunts her.

At the front door she growls, “You keep turning up where I am.”

“M said Leia messaged her,” says the voice on the other side. 

“Why?”

“I think they’re worried for you. Both of them.”

“I don’t need to be managed or to be protected.”

“I know that. But maybe you need someone to vent to. Someone who isn’t as close to the problem as Leia is.”

“I don’t want any solutions,” she warns.

“I am not here to offer you any.” Pause, and then: “Open the door please. I’m about to freeze out here.”

She fumbles all the locks on the door open, and -- 

Cassian looks up at her from where he’s still sitting on the front step.

“You do look cold,” is all she can say.

“Your powers of observation are as astute as always,” is the reply, sardonic only up to a point, because she’s watching him struggle to his feet, because he’s hurrying past her into the house. “Close the door please.”

“Where were you,” she asks, eventually.

“A beach,” and maybe he’s not lying, if he’s dressed in a linen shirt and lightweight suit trousers. Purely decorative leather shoes, nothing remotely protective about those. The only bag he’s carrying is the small rucksack she recognizes from a few other encounters.

“Come on,” she says, and she leads him back to her room, and she hands him an extra blanket as he sits down next to the fireplace, as he holds his hands out to the crackling blaze. She can see the color coming back to his face. Sand lingering on his elbows, at the roots of his hair.

He, too, seems slow and labored as he strips off right there on the hearth-rug, as he extracts a t-shirt and a pair of shorts from his rucksack.

So she hobbles over to her own bags and offers him a pair of pajama trousers, the elastic in the waist hopelessly worn out.

“Thanks.” She watches him glance at her arm. “Souvenir?”

She nods.

“I wouldn’t say no if you had any industrial-strength painkillers to go with.”

“Bedside table,” she says.

“Later,” is his answer. “I can’t fucking move. Must be below ten degrees out already.”

“It’ll get really cold here in a few weeks,” she says.

“Going to need clothes,” is all the rejoinder he has.

For a long moment, the only sounds in the room are the crackling cracking of the log in the fireplace.

“They really sent you here?” she asks, eventually.

“I think they’re trying to play matchmaker,” he says, straight-faced.

Jyn snorts, but not in a rude way.

The sound does make Cassian chuckle, and shake his head a little -- but the movement is interrupted by a yawn that nearly makes him topple over onto his back.

“Bed,” Jyn says, and she sets the example, leaving the left side for him to fall heavily into.

“You’re normally on this side,” Cassian mutters, after a few moments of settling.

“This isn’t normal,” and she motions to her bandages.

“I guess it’s not.”

The terrible thoughts are still spiraling in her mind, but is it just her imagination, or have they quieted down some? His breathing, next to her, is oddly soothing. 

Even when it’s interrupted by another yawn -- and the rustling of him turning onto his side, so he’s facing her.

She doesn’t quite ask. “You’re waiting for me to talk.” 

“That’s up to you. Me, I’m just glad for this place. And for you in this place.”

That’s his hand, gentle weight wrapping around her good wrist. He’s bringing her hand up to his mouth -- he’s breathing a kiss over her palm, and she can’t help but respond, but stroke her fingertips over the angle of his jaw.

“You’re warm,” he continues, and he presses her hand to his cheek before letting her go. 

“No, don’t,” she hears herself say.

She takes his hand and places it onto her chest.

He smiles, faintly. “As long as I know you’re still around.”

“I have a bad feeling about -- everything else,” she murmurs, half confessing, half steeling herself.

“I know. I’ll help if you need me to. If not, I’ll still be hoping you come out all right.”

She can’t tell him she’s afraid.

She just says, “Kiss me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Look me up on tumblr at [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
